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Broad Institute core faculty member Feng Zhang has been named the 2014 recipient of the Alan T. Waterman Award from the National Science Foundation. The award, named after the NSF’s first director, is the agency’s highest honor, which annually recognizes an outstanding researcher under the age of 35. Zhang’s award will help support his work to understand how the brain works.

For patients with a rare brain tumor known as craniopharyngioma, the treatment options are slim — and often hazardous. Although the tumor is usually not aggressive, its location is perilous. Growing at the base of the skull near the pituitary gland, the tumor compresses parts of the brain as it enlarges, causing vision and learning problems and endocrine dysfunction, as well as morbid obesity. There is currently no drug to shrink the tumor, so the only options are surgical removal and radiation, which can leave patients with serious, lasting problems.

In science, sometimes you need to dive deep to see the big picture. Scientists at the Broad Institute have demonstrated this time and again, enabling biological discoveries by generating dense maps, such as the survey of thousands of epigenetic marks on DNA across the human genome conducted as part of the ENCODE project.

For the last five years, scientists at the Broad Institute have been helping generate a catalog of the trillions of microorganisms living on – and in – the human body. We now know that these passengers, collectively known as the microbiome, are not merely cargo; they have physiologic effects, both positive and detrimental, on their human hosts.

What: In continued work of the ENCODE project, which is aimed at uncovering the functional landscape of the human genome, a team of researchers from the Broad Institute’s Epigenomics Program and the Massachusetts General Hospital recently developed a method to test the functions of genomic elements.

As a patient facing illness, knowing what’s ailing you can bring peace of mind and, more importantly, can inform treatment decisions. For neglected infectious diseases, accurate diagnostic tools can be revolutionary, saving lives and shaping the health of entire communities.

For Sangeeta Bhatia, now is an exciting time to be a biomedical engineer. Her research on liver regeneration and nanomedicine spans the diverse and quickly advancing fields of nanotechnology, regenerative medicine, infectious disease, cancer, and tissue engineering, among others.

Broad scientists publish hundreds of research papers every year. Some of those papers are among the most noteworthy in that journal issue, and may even be chosen as the issue’s “cover story” with accompanying artwork on the journal’s cover — an honor for scientists and artists alike.

The human microbiome project revealed the vast numbers and types of microbes that live on and in the human body. While this thought may be unpleasant, humans can have larger, more gruesome passengers hitching a ride, such as the several-centimeter-long nematode Loa loa, which infects millions of people in Western and Central Africa.

Join us in congratulating David Altshuler, chief academic officer and deputy director of the Broad Institute, on his election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. As a member, he joins some of the world’s most accomplished leaders from academia, business, public affairs, the humanities, and the arts, including Broad director Eric Lander and institute founder Eli Broad.